ECBUY.ph Ver3.0

We're rebuilding ECBUY Philippines now. One with tech blog component and another, the tech store. Exciting project again. Of course, it is wordpress powered and WMN hosted. Please see here.

Designing Spaces

trading spaces, instant impact

trading spaces, instant impact

Trading spaces is an old book we got (2004) based from a reality home tv show of the same name. Hosted mainly by Paige Davis.

This book is a nice read for DIY interior designer (cough) or to those who want some doable home improvement projects. Not really heavy on stuff about furniture but more on low-cost instant home – room makeovers. Each topic or section, it gives 2 to 3 sample projects. And i must say, it’s kinda inspiring and makes me wanna to some redecorating around the house.

The book dwells on fabrics, paint finishes and painting methods and architectural detailing (from this section, i learned a lot) and embellishments. The most entertaining part for me is chapter four, “artwork, made easy.”

The great thing about this book is that, the insertion of easy to accomplish projects like sewing, wallpaper, pillowcase making, repainting of furniture. Quickie tools, tips and techniques for topics like stitches, fabric terms, paint brushes and paint rollers use, architectural and construction materials are all worth reading.

And in fact, the book is in my re-read lists. Grab a back issue copy (from eBay!) and say… “it’s time to get busy and have fun.”

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Book description from here.

* Hit television show inspires more than a dozen ideas to decorate any surface in any room.
* Power decorating techniques for anyone with limited time or money.
* Chapters are organized by decorating topic so readers can choose a technique and instantly engage.
* Room tours and advice for many decorating styles and room types.
* Easy-to-finish projects require a few simple steps and readily available materials.

Back cover description…

Trading Spaces, Instant Impact. Pack your home with personality. Filled with ideas to take your home from blah to beautiful, Trading Spaces – Instant Impact is your all-in-one guide for inspiration, expert advice, and cool projects.

This book includes:

* 15 Amazing Makeovers featured on Trading Spaces and Trading Spaces: Family
* Quick and easy step-by-step projects – from bedding to furniture fix-ups – sure to bring wow factor to every room of your home
* Tried and true strategies for adding architectural detail, painting, framing artwork and more!
* Instant replays that feature some of the very best project ideas from trading spaces talented designers.
* Ideas for adding architectural details to a room, embellishing furnishings, creating decorative accessories, and beyond.

Project: Philippine Hotel Guide

I have this pending project that is pending no more... a directory of hotels in the Philippines.

I placed it inside bLINK (AKA, blog LINK), put it on a subdomain, and again, I used the cool Wordpress as the publishing platform.

http://hotel.blink.ph - Philippine Hotel Guide.

I logged 6 hours on this project (excluding the encoding of the hotels' details, an assistant typed it for me). Four hours yesterday (12:30 to 4:30), then another hour last night, and another 1 hour today (March 6th).

A quickie project where we list Philippine hotels indexed per location and with direct telephone numbers for inquiry, booking & reservation. At every page of this site, see sidebar, listed are Philippine hotels categorized per province or city/town.

(What I get from this? Besides adding up another site in bag, and besides loading the site with some ads, this site is also a test site for my own self study, Do-It-Yourself SEO learning.)

In the coming days, we will still manually add up some entries to make the directory bigger.

We would like to grow this directory even more, thus additions on this Philippine Hotel Guide are very much welcome. Please submit new entries using this form. And, we would like this Philippine Hotel Guide/Directory to be as accurate as possible. Any corrections, updates, additional details you would like us to add and change, please send us a note using this form.

On your next country tripping, please check our site for some Philippine hotels.

Bon Voyage!

PBA Online Ending, Wanna Bet?

This entry is planned to be a two-part post about "PBA Ending." This is the fist part of two. If I am pumped enough, I’ll finish and post the second part, titled “I was an Ending Kobrador in Highschool.”

Part 1 - “My Planned PBA Betting Game That Went Kapus & Kaput”

As the PBA opened up a new betting game (a year or so ago) and virtually shutting down the possibility of a PBA endorsed “Ending” game, I’ll share an online-mafia idea few can think of. Few, because the idea is absurd.

For years, the PBA stayed away from gambling and betting for obvious reasons. And so hearing (actually, reading) that the PBA and PAGCOR just tangled up for betting game a year ago is a surprise

Yesteryear, I was thinking along the line too of making an online game. The entrepreneur in me gave me the idea of making a social PBA ending, online based, a PBA ending game that can be played wherever you may be in the Philippines.

A simple internet connection is needed, available at your nearest internet rentals or in bed using your laptop. (The idea came after I had a blog entry about this sports gambling site.)

But the idea is not possible coz the PBA is aloofly interested in gambling on well, gambling. Because the PBA won’t ever put a stamp on an “ending” game, the only way one could make an online ending game was operate in stealth mode. A project waiting to be grounded in case it took flight. With the chance of being shut down after becoming a hit is not a good business plan. Imagine spending tens of thousand to the develelopment, the next day, you get a letter from the PBA and GAB legal teams telling you to shutdowm. So there goes your 100 grand.

But still, I was thiought of this seriously, even had a chat with a web developer going to the nitty-gritty of the programming. ONLY, I am a netentrepreneur and not Al Capone, a mafia boss, so the IDEA remains to be that, an IDEA.

Continuing with the scheme… How would an online ending game be executed? Online interface only needs simple programming and creativity. Programming side is easy and can be done once the object of the play is drawn. A site only needs to have sheets or tabs where players, I mean bettors will place their bets.

To simplify and for sampling, the site only needs to have 5 tabs for each game. Each tab progresses in jackpot value. Like, Tab 1 – a bet of P10 will net you P800. Tab 2 – A bet of 20, the pot is P1600. Finally, Tab 5 – a bet of P200 will give you a chance of winning P16,000.00. If ever each tabs are filled up and games is still a day (hours even) away, additional tabs will be available. (I wasted 15 minutes of my life just to get the numbers right. God, I will never get that 15 minutes back. And, about 2 hours making this post.)

Bettors only need to load their accounts with bet-loads to be consumed and used at site. They could easily get their winnings or even their remaining loads via online banking to those who have net banking accounts. Via mobile banking using Smart and Globes mechanisms. Or via the old-fashioned, wired payments. Direct encashment from participating enterprises is also possible. Just to be in with the times, texting can be easily integrated with the betting scheme. Power to the Peso!

But wait, there’s more… A user can actually see his game-betting history, his placed bet, his lucky ending combinations, cash-outs, etc. by visiting his user account, aptly named, BetLogs (don’t you love that, the term alone, makes my plan a winner). Nice?

Of course, being confidential and that it contain private details, your friend will not be able to access your BetLog. Much love is needed to access the BetLog. Betlog s sacred.

Some sample predicaments: A. You won P16,000 and you’re checking your BetLog in bed in an air-conditioned room, that’s a Win-Win situation. Right? B. You’ve been placing bet for weeks, not winning even the lowest pot and checking your BetLog at a rented PC, that a loss-loss station. Loss-loss! Got it?

The PBA ending game is a simple one. It would have been easier (and a smashing hit) had the PBA just went the easy way of doing a PBA betting game. Even a fool can understand how “ending” works. Choose a number combo, watch the game (hell, you could even skip this wathing part) or read the newspaper, surf the net and look for the final score. 97 - 85 scores nets a 7-5 “ending”; 80 - 70 final score gives you 0-0, and so on.

In fact, with the Ending Game’s non-complexity, it forced the PBA and PAGCOR to devise their game (hulahoops) to counter the possibility of players, coaches, teams and (most definitely) referees to control the results. PBA’s Hula-Hoops (their ending version) died out easily. Will we ever see them have another crack at it? If ever they do, they should sign me up, My Ending Is A Winner. =)

Pepe's Rock n Roll

More pix n specs here.

Be-productive, Bizikat

I paid some dollars to have this domain (BIZIKAT.COM) registered then I totally dropped this in the pecking order of projects to be done.

Since the NBA 08 done, the PBA too done, Olympics done, TV time is now directed to project testing time. So, I finally had the time to get back at this domain and see what I can make out of this.

The plan...

• Philippine Web Directory.
• This pinoy online directory is already pre-loaded with "admin added" websites and companies.
• Super easy listing. Only 4 minutes and you're done.
• With heavy preference to internet presence, blogs, internet forums, online stores, company websites, etc.
• Only Philippine based or with Filipino connection can list their sites.
• It's totally FREE listing.
• For accuracy, this internet directory 100% human edited and supervised. (AHEM, that's me.)
  
• Each listing has "hits" counter and added image gallery option.
• For registered user, the power to edit, delete your entries in the future.

Right now, I am in the process of filling up the categories (an unenviable task really) coz the categories are broad and the sub categories never end.

Bizikat.com is a Philippine web directory. Specifically created for Filipinos and Philippine based companies, businesses, corporations, websites, enterprises, etc. Bizikat.com generally offers the following: A quick but a totally efficient, complete contact, easy to use, cleanly designed and a cool Philippine online directory.

The end-result of which is helping you to be more popular or sikat. Thus, be sikat. Looking at it in a diffrent way, Bizikat simply means, listing your Business (BIZ) in the Internet (i) to right category (KAT) with the purpose of letting other easily find your website/company.

This should be ready soon so I'll wake up before September ends.

HTML Site Wire to Wire

Spent yesterday's PM and today's PM drafting/making a layout for a quite frankly, sister's company. Literally.

It took me a day to do this. Yep, I am slow. The background images take time to do. All images used here are made from scratch. But, the basic lay-outing and placement is easy. Just like inserting tables on a word document.

Because owner thinks (I think so too) that pure HTML websites are getting more Google love than database driven (os commerce, joomla, mambo, drupal, etc.) websites. More so, if you didn't tweak the search engine friendliness of the URL of the database site. Say goodbye to GOOG, err, GOOD SERP.

The site/company does Semicon Industry related products and services and it should be live in some days. I think. I hope.

Blozooming Even More

One day, I woke up dreaming of building a classifieds ads website. One big problem, I am not a real programmer. But hey, am driven. Back in January, after some weeks, I was able to build one... BLOZOOM!

Then other (offline and online) projects came in so Blozoom! dev went to a halt. This week I was able to go back and look inside Blozoom.com and see what can be added. Tonight, some weak tweaks were added...

1. We removed the footer ads at the bottom of the page. It's mildly useless anyways.
2. We improved the delivery of GOOGLE ADS via other Joomla Module.
3. We inserted one ad inside the ad descripton page. Just to pay bills, you know.
4. Blozoom now has RANDOM MESSAGE atop the page. Yes, on top. Look up.
5. Blozoom now has SHOUTBOX. Really did not want this, but hell, all other classifieds sites have this so we went ahead and put one.
6. Notice the footer - credits. Funny thing is, this site is developed by WMN but take a look at WMN site, its stuck in year of 2000. LOL!
7. We've installed a "Your Badge" add on where user can copy the html to place the badge on his personal/company website or any other sites that allow html insertions like Blogspot, Myspace, Friendster, etc. (see the ugly sample at the sidebar... i'll edit that! i'm sleepy!)
   
8. All content items (like Tips, Tutorials, Blog Entry, FAQs) inside Blozoom! are loaded with Ads!
9. We've laid out all the categories at the bottom page for your easy navigation and hopefully some search engine luv.
   
10. Powerful Google Search at the bottom of the page as well. Make me a rich man, use that.
    

And more to come.

It's Coming Together!

Buy and Sell in the Philippines thru Blozoom.com

Buy and Sell in the Philippines thru Blozoom.com

Been BZ past days... as in BZ!... as in B!Z... as in Blozoom! Busy.

I have been selling online way back then & been creating sites using opensource software. Then, one morning while peeing, I said, lemme make a buy and sell site for our own usage, fun and testing. We use only few online selling sites(auction.ph, buynsellplus.com, ebay.ph and sulit.com.ph), so we created another one albeit lesser features than others. But still, this one is full feature classifieds sites waiting to take your items for sale, unwanted stuff, etc.

Sell you house, sell your camera, sell you car... Check out Philippines Buy and Sell site... Cool buying and selling... Post for free... Fast way of contating the buyer and seller... Yes, free posting of ads... online selling in the Philippines, fast... ladies and gentlemen, another free Philippines clasiffieds site... it's simple to use and did I mention FREE...

BLOZOOM.COM - Buy Sell Fast - Buy and Sell Philippines

The to-do list for Blozoom.com is long and we will be fine tuning the site in the coming days. We marked Feb 14 2008 as the actual birthdate of Blozoom.com. If we can find some freebies to give that day (ah yes, Feb 14 is Valentines day), we'll be happy to share some stuff!!! Hey, we got no Sogo Hotel or Wise Hotel gift check. (On other note, hard copy Buy and Sell Philippines Newsprint gives, Sogo Hotel discounts.)

Head over at Blozoom.com and be one of the early birds. BLOZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!